Chapter 9

“So we have a potential bad guy who was born in England, but he acts and talks like he’s from France,” Remo asked. “Why again?”

“Many respect the French arrogance and see it as strength of character,” Chiun said.

“Not all French people are arrogant,” Remo said.

“This is true. Those French who lack self-esteem are merely rude.”

“Some are nice. I’m sure there are nice French people, Chiun. But if this race-car driver wants to be French so bad, why did the queen of England make him a knight?”

“The queen was compelled to take this action so as to reclaim him for England,” Smith had explained on the phone as they were en route. “Rilli had an extremely successful season last year, and his popularity wasn’t spilling over on England the way it might have. Being knighted reminded the world that Rilli was from England.”

Now Rilli was going to take advantage of his knighthood. Maybe. Smith and Mark Howard had been on the watch for unusual behavior by any persons knighted by the queen of England. Rilli’s clandestine travel to the former British colony of Ayounde—by freighter—qualified as suspicious.

As Remo and Chiun were making quick time through the sparse Ayounde airport terminal, Remo veered off course to intercept a hustling ASN broadcast crew, conspicuous in their brand-new AllSportsNetwork jerseys. The network was resurrected from the recently humiliated Extreme Sports Network. The former executives of ESN were on trial with fraud charges pending against them in more than seventy countries worldwide; ASN had been assembled from the liquidated assets—including the human assets.

“What’s up, you guys?”

“Like you don’t know,” said a frumpy woman in overalls, dragging a wheeled luggage cart burdened with video equipment. “You a driver?”

“I have a driver’s license,” Remo said.

“Are you a grand prix driver?” she added.

“No.”

“If you’re not on a car crew, what are you doing here?”

“I asked you first. Shouldn’t you people be in Hoboken, shooting a high-school soccer match?”

“It’s that jerk Michele Rilli,” a pudgy crewman gasped as he huffed along with a large equipment case in each hand.

Remo gave the man his full attention. “Let me give you a hand.” He slipped the cases out of the man’s hands faster than the man could see, but he was happy for the relief. Remo strolled along with him.

“He’s staging a sort of surprise grand prix demonstration. Wants to launch a real grand prix here next year. Wants it to be early in the year, the first grand prix of the season.”

Remo considered that. “Why make the demonstration a surprise?” he asked.

“Generates more excitement among the locals,” the pudgy one explained, rolling his shoulders. “How do you carry those things so easy?”

Remo was toting the heavy cases as if they were filled with lacy lingerie, not steel camera and light mounts. “But he won’t get the coverage he wants, right, by making it a surprise? I mean, you guys will be here but none of the big networks will come, will they? No offense.”

“Ha!” The woman in the overalls laughed. “When Michele Rilli calls, they’ll come. He’s huge.”

Remo nodded and placed the cases back in the hands of the pudgy man, who wasn’t expecting them and felt his shoulders get yanked out of their sockets.

“Makes sense to me, Little Father,” Remo said as he returned to Chiun, standing impatiently still and silent in the middle of the terminal. “I think this really is just a big PR stunt.”

“You are usually wrong,” Chiun pointed out.

“I’m sometimes right,” Remo added.

Calling in a few favors, the customs officer managed to have the wharf cleared within sight of the French cargo ship as it off-loaded its herd of grand prix racers.

“I cannot contain any excitement at seeing this famous collection of cars, sir.” Getting no answer, the customs officer turned and found himself alone. Sir Rilli was hustling back up the ramp and shouting orders.

Men began emerging from the deckhouse in racing gear, and the officer grew concerned when he saw that they were wearing heavy, padded race suits of a type most unsuitable for the high temperatures of the Ayounde capital city of Ayounde. More men streamed out behind them. The customs officer blinked and looked again. Certainly they were not toting grand prix car maintenance tools of any kinds; those could only be automatic rifles.

“Sir Rilli, what is the meaning of the guns, sir?” The customs officer was running up the ramp. “Why was I not informed that there were guns aboard, sir?”

“Because it is none of your business,” Rilli replied. He was relieved that now he could drop the charade of French friendliness and fall back on his more comfortable French obstinance. Most people did not realize that the French could be downright contrary when they set their minds to it. This was the side of the French personality that the tourists never saw.

But the customs agent was given the rare privilege of seeing just how ornery a British-born Frenchman by blood could be.

“This is inexcusable, sir! I will require you to keep those men on the vessel. I am afraid a more thorough inspection will now be needed.”

“Uh, well, now yuh become quite the inspector,” Rilli snarled in a French-Cockney accent that would have shattered a sparkling-wine glass. “You are unfit to work for the next governor of this colony!”

The inspector was stopped short by this confusing statement “Pardon?”

“No pardon!” Rilli cried, and backhanded the unwitting inspector. The sucker slap sent the inspector reeling off balance on the steep ramp while Rilli danced in a circle and shook his smarting hand. “Ow! Ow! Ow!”

“Are you hurt, Governor Rilli?” asked a worried assistant.

“Oui! Oui! Oui!”

Just as the customs inspector was about to regain his balance, one of the silent gunmen placed his foot on the ramp and gave it a quick, soundless shove. The inspector yelped. Rill turned just in time to see him vanish. There was a thud. Rilli stepped to the rail and found the man flattened on the wharf, limbs akimbo.

“Did I do that?” he asked.

“Yes, of course, Governor,” said his assistant, trying to wrap gauze around Rilli’s hurt hand.

“Auspicious start to the takeover, innit, killing a guy?” He was back at full-strength Cockney.

“Indeed, Governor.” The assistant was mummifying the bruised knuckles in bandages.

“Forget that!” Rilli shook his hand until the gauze unfurled. “Let’s begin. Deploy!” He marched down the ramp, yanking his car keys out of his pocket, and hit the master unlock button on his remote. The cargo containers chirped electronically, and their locking bolts shot open with hundreds of angry metallic snaps. The walls on the front and sides fell flat, while the back wall stayed up and held in place the top of the container.

Revealed inside each container was a very dangerous racing car, its engine coming to life as the crates opened. The cars looked at first glance to be the latest, state-of- the-art models, like the ones Rilli drove to victory time and again the previous season. In Bahrain and San Marino. In Hungary and Italy. In Belgium and China and Japan and Brazil and in every other bleeding grand prix race of the season last year except bleeding Spain.

These cars had a few extras not to be found on the average twenty-first-century grand prix machine. Offensive hardware.

“Let’s ride,” he called excitedly, and because it sounded like a good line. He jumped into the McGaren-Yhuihobi Special and stepped on the gas pedal. The machine rumbled like a waking carnivore.

The gasoline-powered McGaren-Yhuihobi Special was the prototype of the Grand Prix-Type Offensive Attack Race Car, designed for more reliability, better street performance and greater flexibility in offensive maneuvers. Still, they had the aggressive power and handling of a true grand prix racer.

Assembly of a full two dozen such vehicles, with their special accessories and custom cargo containers, hadn’t been cheap. But then, that’s why professional racing had sponsors.

Bernie Saward was practically crooning on the telephone. “It’s happening, Mr. Hammerstone. Michele Rilli’s promotions coordinator just called me from his offices in Paris. Sir Rilli is on the ground—he’s in Africa!”

“Africa?” Hammerstone repeated groggily. He’d been dozing in his desk chair in his spacious top-floor office. “What the hell for in Africa?”

“Ayounde. They actually have a consuming economy in Ayounde. Doesn’t matter—what matters is that the surprise grand prix is about to begin.”

Bemie Saward was meeting the members of the board of directors at the door of the conference hall, beaming and greeting each one of them like the happy bride just after the ceremony. The directors were slow to respond—it was three o’clock in the morning in Connecticut. None of them wanted to miss the big Ayounde Grand Prix—with their corporate logos plastered on the cowlings of half the cars in the event.

The large plasma screen at one end of the boardroom table was showing CNN, but it was muted. CNN was running a segment on the latest film box-office results.

“Check it out,” sang Bernie Saward, and he clicked the sound on as a pair of big oblong shapes appeared on the television, transforming each into the broad grins of two happy youngsters holding their gigantic soft-serve ice-cream cones.

“Mine’s dipped in pure milk chocolate!” exclaimed the girl.

“Mine’s sprinkled with sprinkles!” cried the boy.

“Thanks, Milkie Queen!” they shouted together, and the camera pulled back as the animated, well-endowed Milkie Queen waved back to her ecstatic young customers from the walk-up window at a neighborhood Milkie Queen stand.

“Good work,” Bernie Saward said. “How did you get us on the same night as the Ayounde Grand Prix?”

“Easy, Mr. Saward. I bought time on every news network on every overnight this week. Cut us some great bargains, too, I don’t mind saying. And about an hour from now, our viewership is gonna go through the roof.”

There was a murmur of excitement. “You’re sure this is going to happen?” asked the ever morose vice president of accounting.

“It is happening, within the hour,” Saward assured him.

“You sure it’ll get coverage?” asked the guest director from an Oklahoma cattle conglomerate.

“With Michele Rilli’s name behind it, it will get huge coverage.”

The cattleman’s doubt reflected on his face. “I’m trusting you on that. Never heard of this Mr. Michele.”

“He’s the biggest star in the world of grand prix racing,” Saward said impatiently.

“Which don’t hold a candle to NASCAR,” the cattle executive grumbled.

“Outside the U.S., people care about grand prix,” Saward said in a firm voice to settle the argument. “Milkie Queen must penetrate Europe if she’s going to keep growing.”

“And Milkie Queen Must Enlarge, gentlemen. Remember our mantra.” He thrust a hand at the banner that hung like some Roman drapery over the wall, above the screen. “Milkie Queen Must Enlarge.”

The swathe of fine silk was handwoven and hand-dyed, using natural pigments derived from creatures that should have been on the endangered list. The color was milky yellow, a color belonging to human illness. The handmade embroidery used a variety of rare threads. The fringe was silk spun with gold filament. Every detail of the banner was intended to increase its cost. Only by making the object outrageously expensive would it have an impact on the men whom it was designed to impact. Their logic went this way: we invested hundreds of thousands of dollars into it; we had better pay attention to it, or the money was wasted.

Oddly, the high-priced message was designed to focus their attention on increasing profits.

The banner was necessary, because these were men who had failed before. The banner was their penance and their punishment.

Shareholder Profit Is The Only Purpose was one of the smaller messages stitched in the rising and falling folds of the banner.

Dividends Or Termination was another.

At one time this board of directors was satisfied to keep the chain of soft-serve restaurants floating along without appreciable growth. There was a little profit made; there were a few stores opened every year. The product line might go unchanged for three or four years at a stretch.

For years Milkie Queen was the target of critics in every facet of the food-service business. “Management without ambition,” the financial journals reported. “Goin’ Nowhere Fast, Not Carin’ Much” was the title of mockumentary on the company. The company executives seemed not to care. Since they were the majority shareholders, their attitude festered at every level of the Milkie Queen management structure.

In the early years of the twenty-first century, Milkie Queen was briefly held as an example of a “civil” corporation, in which profits could be made without resorting to ruthless tactics.

The backlash was immediate and vicious. “A scandal on league with the Enron fiasco,” spouted critics from other retail giants and the financial media—all of whom depended on ruthless tactics to keep their companies functional and reporting on them interesting enough to be readable.

“They’re trying to bring back hippie culture,” decried an op-ed piece that was reprinted in a thousand newspapers. “They’re lazy and proud of it. The Age of Aquarius school of management didn’t work in the late 1990s, and it won’t work today!”

Seething with contempt, the big business lobbies paid millions to quietly purchase an obscure amendment to the anticorruption rules being put in place by the Federal Trade Commission. They timed the law to go into effect the week before the death of Farris Milkie Jr., CEO of Milkie Queen and son of the dairy farmer who started the business. The rule forced the sale of one percent of Farris Milkie’s stock.

The result was catastrophic. With fifty-one percent now owned by nonfamily, the company experienced a traumatic shift in culture.

No more Mr. Nice Firm. No more Our Company Is Okay, Your Company Is Okay. Milkie Queen became a backstabbing, soulless greed machine with one overriding purpose: to make profits for shareholders.

“Now they’re one of us!” proclaimed the financial journals ecstatically.

Now, Milkie Queen’s directors had to slash costs and payrolls and absolutely had to grow. Fast. Which meant growth outside the United States. Which meant Europe.

“You sure they’re gone watch an exhibition race that hasn’t been promoted ahead of time?” asked Director Farris Milkie III, who had become fantastically wealthy in the last year even as he began experiencing depression and anxiety attacks.

Burt Latch, treasurer, shrugged it off. “They’ll watch it. Think of it not as a promotional sporting event but as a news item. That’s how it will play—on every news channel, over and over. We’ll be front and center for every broadcast.”

“What if something goes wrong?” Milkie persisted. “They haven’t planned for this. What if some locals get hurt?”

“Won’t matter,” Latch stated. “It’s Africa. Nobody cares much about Africans.”

“Burt, you’re black!” Milkie exclaimed.

“Hey, I do care,” Latch assured him. “But nobody else would.”

Milkie sucked on his steroid inhaler. “What if something big goes really really wrong?” he whined.

“It won’t.”